The SLAPPs From Microsofters Distract From Serious Copyright Infringement by Microsoft and Apparent Business Crimes
Aside from other issues, such as strangling women
The SLAPPs from Microsofters prove the Streisand Effect is real (we didn't coin this term, Mike Masnick did). We keep receiving a lot of inquiries about it and last night a very large law firm phoned us about it. They recognise something is very wrong and legal reform is imperative. It meanwhile looks like the law firm facilitating these SLAPPs is collapsing (staff leaving), so maybe it's like another Discreet Law.
As we've said right from the very start, based on the timings in particular it's not too hard to guess what's happening here. There's coordination [1, 2] and it started as soon as we were causing chaos at GitHub, for reasons other than the copyright infringement [1, 2] and strangulation of women - a taboo topic. The core issue is business abuse/crimes (e.g. possibly fraud and embezzlement, as we covered way back in 2021) - most likely the reason GitHub's CEO and his sidekick Miguel de Icaza suddenly 'left'. Months ago their "best friend" engaged in extortion (which legal professionals tell me is illegal) to compel me to remove many pages about it. I declined.
On the issue of copyright infringement (including GPL violations), "Anonymous Coward" (AC) cited and quoted Microsoft as saying: "We have incorporated filters and other technologies that are designed to reduce the likelihood that Copilots return infringing content" (Microsoft pretty much admitted it in its lobbying blog: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot-copyright-commitment-ai-legal-concerns/ [microsoft.com])
An associate notes, "so the infringement still goes on, it is just hidden better". Or as AC put it: "So before the filters it did infringe, and after the filters they think it'll infringe less but not stop infringing?"
So just to summarise, what these people try to censor isn't just men being arrested for crimes against women but also business crimes and the biggest GPL violations ever (Microsoft might be forced to pay close to 10 billion dollars in the class-action lawsuit).
Slop as "code" is overhyped; it works no better than traditional code reuse or leveraging interfaces (APIs, libraries and so on). Some coding experts explained this. They still do. Unconscious GPL violations via slop don't bear much real potential. As for Microsoft, some challenge the lie that programmers got replaced by automation. There are mass layoffs and many programmers got removed, according to detailed breakdowns. It's not because of "AI" that Microsoft fires so many development staff. It was a smokescreen strategically timed to distract from bad news [1, 2], including soaring debt levels. They're wasting money on falsely-marketed gimmicks, or as an associate puts it, "notice that slop generation sites and data centers are measured in megawatts or gigawatts and not useful metrics related to calculation like PFLOPs or similar. "AI" is about conspicuous consumption of wealth with the goal of not producing anything useful."
Ryan commented on this earlier on. "In my opinion," he said, ""investing" in "AI" just accelerates the decline. Instead of looking for a new business model they just stuff chatbots into things where nobody wanted them. They cost a lot to make, nobody wants them. They should be investing this money prudently into offering better business services. They're not a monopoly with the sort of things Azure is doing, so they need to spend money to make money here. "AI" is crowding this out badly, and while their business customers suffer hours-long outages and security breaches."
More recently, Ryan remarked on the waste of energy, saying: "Reminds me of Dune. That's where I picked up the concept of conspicuous consumption. When I read that when I was about 12 years old. I remember it described the desert planet and how the rich would wash their hands and then throw water on the floor for the servants to gather off the floor with cloths for their own use. But yes, conspicuous consumption is usually even worse than expecting your slaves to gather water off the floor in the middle of a desert. Because rich and upper middle class people are expected to consume, things they don't even want or need, just to make a point that you're too poor to have it. And this consumption doesn't create much of anything. Like Rolex watches, or now I guess, a trip to Disney World."
"If I have a need for something I might pay money for it. If I want something, I might pay money for it, if there's money to spare after the wants. But I don't see myself as excessively greedy or terribly swayed by marketing."
A lot of what Microsoft calls "AI" boils down to false marketing or old (not novel) things being rebranded using new and overly glorified buzzwords.
"Over the past 23 years I've usually been too poor to consider consuming much just for the hell of it," Ryan said. "Thankfully there's still public parks and libraries, for now. It's a holdover from a more civilized age."
Slop is an attack on the Commons, not a contribution to it. Some slop companies accuse of "theft" those who merely use their slop (which it itself copyright-infringing).
As Cory Doctorow put it, "these models are expensive to run. Even if a bankrupt AI company’s model and servers could be acquired for pennies on the dollar, even if the new owners could be shorn of any overhanging legal liability from looming copyright cases, even if the eye-watering salaries commanded by AI engineers collapsed, the electricity bill for each query – to power the servers and their chillers – would still make running these giant models very expensive."
He said that a lot of the current "AI" frenzy was just subsidised by VCs (like Uber was) and recalled the 90s "dotcom bubble", saying: "[...] This created a weird and often wonderful dynamic in the Bay Area, a brief respite between the go-go days of Bubble 1.0 and Bubble 2.0, a time when the cost of living plummeted in the Bay Area, as did the cost of office space, as did the cost of servers. People started making technology because it served a need, or because it delighted them, or both. Technologists briefly operated without the goad of VCs’ growth-at-all-costs spurs."
A lot of what Microsoft calls "AI" is just plagiarism disguised as "fair use" and copyright experts who oppose this from within the US administration get sacked because "AI" grifters like Scam Altman sponsored the President and inauguration bash.
This is the sort of thing Microsoft wants to distract people from.
At the end of the day we'll seek compensation for the SLAPPs, even if the perpetrators hide in a different continent (in some cabin or dad's home, where they got arrested). One of them will have to book a flight and come here later this year [1, 2] to defend himself in the High Court. His broke lawyers may not be available anymore (the money from Microsoft salaries wasn't enough; the rot has become visible) and they might not even have a licence anymore. Months ago it was dealt a blow after it had fronted for an allegedly pro-Hamas (he denies this) person flinging SLAPPs at newspapers via "Godwin Busuttil instructed by Brett Wilson LLP" (yet again, it was possible to strike out the claim, so this mostly backfired). To quote: "Against this background, I grant the defendant's application to strike out the claim." Godwin Busuttil is a colleague of the "Junior" who both Microsofters chose, not to mention they picked the same lawyer whose notoriety predates the SLAPPs against us. He appears to be leaving.
Also targeted by the same law firm [1, 2, 3] was a person who had exposed tax abuses: (Dan Neidle received SLAPPs from the same lawyer who months later did the same to both my wife and to myself)
They like to accuse people who state facts of spreading "conspiracy theories"; they use the same insulting terms in their SLAPP campaigns. It is not only demeaning but also very unprofessional. Those are attempts to discredit claims (or people or whole publications) based on fictional associations or imaginary rings rather than the underlying facts.
It's just one example among many of rich (and/or corrupt, with ill-gotten wealth) people trying to silence vocal/effective/prominent critics using SLAPPs. It doesn't typically work, but it ends up costing a lot of money (which is perhaps the real intention). We'll need to fix this by illuminating the growing need for reform. British media depends on this reform. The SLAPP-chaining in our case [1, 2, 3] is a clear violation, according to prominent and renowned media lawyers. This cannot possibly end well. Two judges ("Masters") have already independently given favourable (to us) Orders. They're not blind to injustice and Microsoft money isn't on their lap, even if their computer systems and data is on Microsoft's lap.
It's not about saying wrong things, it's about saying things that 'embarrass' powerful people. Or their companies, which their wealth is tied to. For instance, for my recent articles about IBM/Red Hat I seem to have enraged IBM's rapidly-eroding PR team and have attracted trolls/AstroTurfers. They're infesting online forums (centralised censorship hubs), trying to 'deplatform' any discussion of the real issues, typically the ad hominem way [1, 2].
But "that's mostly good," an associate opines, "maybe it is useful to keep pounding the drum about how they used to know how to make money, specifically through FOSS (Linux) investments. Their ideological maneuvers against FOSS in favor of IBM's own competitor, Microsoft, only hurts IBM's own ability to make money."
This week Red Hat's site is selling Microsoft. A decade ago Red Hat was selling secure boot for Microsoft, implanting it inside Linux, the kernel. IBM's Red Hat then tried to shut the lid. The people who do this now SLAPP my wife, who merely reported to the wider public the vile abuse (racist and much worse harassment) she had received.
Red Hat works for IBM. It does not work for "the community" (and hasn't for years; they're exceedingly selfish and patronising, they sell another UNIX). It's like another Novell, whose last CEO came from IBM and tried to SLAPP me. It's not that I published anything wrong, Mr. Hovsepian just alleges that it's "old" and thus should be removed (based on age; it's just reputation laundering, or begging to be 'forgotten'). It's no secret that today's search engines are polluted by LLM "summaries", slopfarms and SEO spam (marketing, not information, which games algorithms to go further up the ranks/SERPs). It's important for us to maintain reputable and accurate information even about old events. This week we test an impending search feature/facility for articles as old as 2006. We do not intend to rely on companies like Google for indexing and serving/presenting old pages of ours. █